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Based on the fluxes of 1400 nearby galaxies observed in far ultraviolet (${\rm FUV}$) and in the H$\alpha$ line, we determined the global star formation rate per unit Universe volume, $j_{\rm SFR}=(1.34\pm0.16) 10^{-2}\,M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-3}$. With the current star formation rate (SFR), ($65\pm4)$% of the observed stellar mass is reproduced in the cosmological time of 13.8 billion years. The neutral gas reserves in the Local Volume with a radius of 11 Mpc will facilitate the current SFR on a scale of approximately another 5 billion years., Comment: Accepted by Astrophysical Bulletin (v.79, No.2), 12 pages, 9 figures, 1 table

Light incident upon materials can induce changes in their electrical conductivity, a phenomenon referred to as photoresistance. In semiconductors, the photoresistance is negative, as light-induced promotion of electrons across the band gap enhances the number of charge carriers participating in transport. In superconductors, the photoresistance is positive because of the destruction of the superconducting state, whereas in normal metals it is vanishing. Here we report a qualitative deviation from the standard behavior in metallic graphene. We show that Dirac electrons exposed to continuous wave (CW) terahertz (THz) radiation can be thermally decoupled from the lattice by 50~K which activates hydrodynamic electron transport. In this regime, the resistance of graphene constrictions experiences a decrease caused by the THz-driven superballistic flow of correlated electrons. We analyze the dependencies of the negative photoresistance on the carrier density, and the radiation power and show that our superballistic devices operate as sensitive phonon-cooled bolometers and can thus offer a picosecond-scale response time. Beyond their fundamental implications, our findings underscore the practicality of electron hydrodynamics in designing ultra-fast THz sensors and electron thermometers., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures

The revolutionary progress in development of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies has made it possible to deliver accurate genomic information in a timely manner. Over the past several years, NGS has transformed biomedical and clinical research and found its application in the field of personalized medicine. Here we discuss the rise of personalized medicine and the history of NGS. We discuss current applications and uses of NGS in medicine, including infectious diseases, oncology, genomic medicine, and dermatology. We provide a brief discussion of selected studies where NGS was used to respond to wide variety of questions in biomedical research and clinical medicine. Finally, we discuss the challenges of implementing NGS into routine clinical use., Comment: 37 pages, 3 figures, 1 table

A prominent media topic in the UK in the early 2020s is the energy crisis affecting the UK and most of Europe. It brings into a single public debate issues of energy dependency and sustainability, fair distribution of economic burdens and cost of living, as well as climate change, risk, and sustainability. In this paper, we investigate the public discourse around the energy crisis and cost of living to identify how these pivotal and contradictory issues are reconciled in this debate and to identify which social actors are involved and the role they play. We analyse a document corpus retrieved from UK newspapers from January 2014 to March 2023. We apply a variety of natural language processing and data visualisation techniques to identify key topics, novel trends, critical social actors, and the role they play in the debate, along with the sentiment associated with those actors and topics. We combine automated techniques with manual discourse analysis to explore and validate the insights revealed in this study. The findings verify the utility of these techniques by providing a flexible and scalable pipeline for discourse analysis and providing critical insights for cost of living - energy crisis nexus research.

The Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE) is a powerful theoretical approach that is capable to accurately treat electron-hole interactions in materials in an excited state. We developed an ab initio framework based on the BSE to describe a pump-probe experiment, in which an x-ray pulse probes solid-state valence excitons by means of x-ray absorption spectroscopy. Our theoretical framework is of relevance for an accurate modeling of pump-probe experiments of photo-excited materials that utilize novel capabilities offered by x-ray science.

We compare two versions of the GW150914 gravitational wave signal analysis by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration. The first version was published in 2016 by this collaboration along with their announcement of the first experimental detection of gravitational waves. It was based on the gravitational wave waveforms with the fully non-linear general-relativistic treatment of the coalescing two-body problem. The second analysis of this signal by the same authors, published in 2017, was based on the quadrupole post-Newtonian (PN) flat spacetime approximation of General Relativity. The authors had shown that the PN-based mass estimation of the system coincide with that obtained by using rigorous relativistic treatment in their first publication. In our view, this coincidence implies that the rigorous non-linear theory for gravitational waveforms of coalescing blackhole binaries does not fully account for the difference between the source and detector reference frames - because the PN-approximation, which is used for the comparison, does not make any distinction between these two reference frames: by design and by the principles and conditions for building the PN-approximation. We discuss possible implications of this conflict and find that the accuracy of most of the previously estimated characteristic (chirp) masses of coalescing binary blackhole systems is likely to be affected by a substantial systematic error. The corresponding luminosity distances of these sources also turn out to be overestimated., Comment: 27 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables

We report on a three-day challenge during which five teams each programmed a nanodrone to be piloted through an obstacle course using bodily movement, in a 3D transposition of the '80s video-game Pacman. Using a bricolage approach to analyse interviews, field notes, video recordings, and inspection of each team's code revealed how participants were shaping and, in turn, became shaped in bodily ways by the drones' limitations. We observed how teams adapted to compete by: 1) shifting from aiming for seamless human-drone interaction, to seeing drones as fragile, wilful, and prone to crashes; 2) engaging with intimate, bodily interactions to more precisely understand, probe, and delimit each drone's capabilities; 3) adopting different strategies, emphasising either training the drone or training the pilot. We contribute with an empirical, somaesthetically focused account of current challenges in HDI and call for programming environments that support action-feedback loops for design and programming purposes.

In recent years, evidence has been obtained that in the outer region of the Solar System (in the inner part of the Oort cloud), at a distance $\sim300-700$ AU from the Sun, there may be a captured planet or a primordial black hole. In this paper, we show that the gravitational scattering of dust particles in the same region on this object can transfer them to new elongated orbits reaching the Earth's orbit. With the mass of the captured object of the order of 5-10 Earth masses, the calculated dust flow near the Earth $\sim0.1-3$$\mu$g m$^{-2}$ yr$^{-1}$ is comparable in order of magnitude with the observed flow. This effect gives a joint restriction on the parameters of the captured object and on the amount of dust in the Oort cloud., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, preprint version

The notion of spectrum for first-order properties introduced by J. Spencer for Erdos-Renyi random graph is considered in relation to random uniform hypergraphs. In this work we study the set of limit points of the spectrum for first-order formulae with bounded quantifier depth and obtain bounds for its maximum value. Moreover, we prove zero-one k-laws for the random uniform hypergraph and improve the bounds for the maximum value of the spectrum for first-order formulae with bounded quantifier depth. We obtain that the maximum value of the spectrum belongs to some two-element set.

The paper deals with the theoretical consideration of surface plasmon-polaritons in the graphene monolayer, embedded into dielectric with spatially separated gain and losses. It is demonstrated, that presence of gain and losses in the system leads to the formation of additional mode of graphene surface plasmon-polaritons, which does not have its counterpart in the conservative system. When the gain and losses are mutually balanced, the position of exceptional point -- transition point between unbroken and broken $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetry -- can be effectively tuned by graphene's doping. In the case of unbalanced gain and losses the spectrum of surface plasmon-polaritons contains spectral singularity, whose frequency is also adjustable through the electrostatic gating of graphene., Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures

Resistive switching in thin films has been widely studied in a broad range of materials. Yet the mechanisms behind electroresistive switching have been persistently difficult to decipher and control, in part due to their non-equilibrium nature. Here, we demonstrate new experimental approaches that can probe resistive switching phenomena, utilizing amorphous TaO$_x$ as a model material system. Specifically, we apply Scanning Microwave Impedance Microscopy (sMIM) and cathodoluminescence (CL) microscopy as direct probes of conductance and electronic structure, respectively. These methods provide direct evidence of the electronic state of TaO$_x$ despite its amorphous nature. For example CL identifies characteristic impurity levels in TaO$_x$, in agreement with first principles calculations. We applied these methods to investigate He-ion-beam irradiation as a path to activate conductivity of materials and enable electroforming-free control over resistive switching. However, we find that even though He-ions begin to modify the nature of bonds even at the lowest doses, the films conductive properties exhibit remarkable stability with large displacement damage and they are driven to metallic states only at the limit of structural decomposition. Finally, we show that electroforming in a nanoscale junction can be carried out with a dissipated power of < 20 nW, a much smaller value compared to earlier studies and one that minimizes irreversible structural modifications of the films. The multimodal approach described here provides a new framework toward the theory/experiment guided design and optimization of electroresistive materials.